WordPress makes it easy and exciting to manage your website and run your business online. It gives you complete control of what you can do with your site. To run your site at its best performance, numerous tasks must be performed regularly. However, most website owners complain about the tediousness of these tasks. Though they seem petty, they take a lot of unnecessary time and effort, and WordPress website automation would solve 90% of the problem.
People are apprehensive about letting plugins perform these simple tasks. But why do something that a software can do quicker and more efficiently than you?
WordPress Automation is
When we say WordPress automation, it is majorly about letting plugins and tools perform some of the most common and important tasks for you without manual input. WordPress has a whole plethora of minute tasks that, in the larger scheme of the website, play a pivotal role. If left unattended, these tasks will lead to clogging and slowing down your site. Some might even be irrevocably damaging.
However, performing these tasks take a lot of time and can be tedious and repetitive. You might want to focus your effort on more critical and creative aspects of your business, but a silly update or a security check is in the schedule, which consumes your precious time. Things like these can be avoided by automating your site and even improve your site performance.
Backups and Updates
Perhaps the two most crucial maintenance tasks that a website owner must perform regularly are backup and update. Backing up your site and its content and updating your WordPress, WordPress theme, and plugins are undisputedly the two most critical tasks to take care of. However, you never know when something goes wrong, when you accidentally delete something, when a plugin expires and is slowing down your site or when there’s a new update. Keeping an eye out for it will take a lot of your time. Instead, you could invest this time and energy into something more productive.
1. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin
Updraft Plus is undisputedly the king of backup plugins. It creates a full backup stored in a safe, external location, which will restore your site quickly if it’s hacked or the information is accidentally deleted. Updraft proudly boasts over 2 million active installs. It lets you restore your backup with a single click!
2. Jetpack (VaultPress)
VaultPress, as part of the JetPack plugin, is also a great plugin to backup your site data. Your website might be vulnerable to server crashes, hacking, security flaws, lousy plugin or theme updates, and insecure web hosting. Activating VaultPress within JetPack can secure your website by creating a safe backup of your complete site. There is a free and premium version of the plugin.
3. WP Auto Updater
WP Auto Updater WordPress plugin enables automatic updates of WordPress Core, Themes, Plugins, and Translations. Version control of WordPress Core makes automatic updates more safely. The plugin is an all in one solution for automating updates.
4. Companion Auto Update
Companion Auto Update is a completely free and powerful plugin. It gives you complete control over your updates. Some of its core features are:
- Auto-updating for plugins, themes, core and translation files
- Filter plugins and themes to not be updated
- E-mail notifications about old software, pending updates, and completed updates
- An update log with all updates
- Option to delay automatic updates with an x number of days
Security monitoring and Spam Blocking
According to the WordPress official site, 80% of vulnerabilities are subject to lousy plugins. wpwhitesecurity states that more than 70% of WordPress sites are vulnerable to malicious attacks.
Similarly, WordPress websites get 487 billion spam messages every month. The most frustrating issue I faced when I created my first WordPress blog was Spam comments and the time their auditing takes. I will share a few plugins for people who are about to create a blog on WordPress.
1. Wordfence Security
Wordfence is an excellent tool with which you can set two-factor authentication, set lockouts in case of malicious activity, automated backups, file scanning, and much more. It is a comprehensive plugin that takes care of all aspects of your site.
2. All In One WP Security & Firewall
The plugin is totally free and doesn’t affect the speed of your site. Their firewall and security scanner can be set to ‘basic,’ ‘intermediate,’ and ‘advance.’ This lets you apply the firewall rules progressively without breaking your site’s functionality.
3. Akismet
Akismet Anti-Spam is the most popular, simple to use and most effective plugin to block and check spam comments. This plugin has saved me tons of tedious comment auditing hours. It automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam. With this one plugin, you don’t need to bother with any other for spam blocking.
Post Scheduling and social media sharing
The simple practice of pre-scheduling your posts and social media shares will save you precious time. It will save you from the last-minute rush and give enough time to audit your content and look for discrepancies. You can be consistent by scheduling your posts beforehand and get a better grip on what goes to your social and when.
WP Scheduled Posts
WordPress has an inbuilt feature that can schedule multiple posts for a desired date and time. However, if you want to schedule posts from multiple authors and admins from a single dashboard, using the WP Scheduled Posts plugin is a great idea. This tool also lets you handle auto social share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest & Instagram. It gets you an Admin Bar & Dashboard Widget showing all your scheduled posts.
This plugin is a one-stop solution to your post schedules and social media shares.
The Broken Link Checker
As you develop and grow your website, older pages and links get neglected. It gets challenging to keep a check on your internal link structure. Over some time, your website will see the issue of broken links. This causes increased bounce rates and bad SEO as visitors avoid sites that show broken pages. It will negatively impact your SERP.
Broken Link Checker is a fantastic tool that will save you the trouble. Broken Link Checker monitors and tests all internal links & external links on your site looking for broken links. It helps you fix bad links to improve SEO and user experience. The whole process gets automated, and you can repair broken links with a single click.
Conclusion
Automating your WordPress saves you not only a lot of time but also eases the process that would have been laborious manually. There is much more in automation like image optimization, basic SEO practices, organizing your mailing list, sending bulk emails, etc. However, you must begin with these critical and central tasks first.
Now that you have more free time on your hand, you an use it for more creative and productive tasks.
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